What are 100,000,000,000 impressions worth?

You read it right. 100 billion impressions. At one a second that would be over 3,168 years. Or about 65% of recorded history. Incredible. But as you might have remembered from my last blog post about the net present value of user generated content, I like to think in terms of “what’s that worth?”

To put it simply, it’s a lot. Let’s consider a few assumptions:

There are probably about 20 impressions average per “decision” made online

Running a few simple calculations, this puts the value per impression at $0.56. Or in total, about $56 billion dollars of online value. If you use the stats published for offline influence, it goes up to $3.25 per impression, or $325 billion in value. Sounds incredible – and sure, there are some assumptions here, but when you think about the impressions we’ve served up in just under five years being worth $325 billion, it ranks as just above the 25th highest Gross Domestic Product. In another five years, it will eclipse the top 10.

Who’d have thought 100 billion user-generated content impressions would be worth more than the GDP of Austria? 😉